http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
IT HAPPENED AGAIN just the other day, during the heat wave. It's been that kind of "winter'' in
these parts. I can't even remember what a snowflake looks like.

There are days, like in the kind of December, that make you want to turn on the air
conditioning, when the Southern mind finally has had it and just goes walking out the door to
do its own thing, think its own thoughts, lose its own way. Occasionally it sends back
postcards with snippy remarks, as if to even old scores. The last one dealt with Martha
Stewart. There's no telling what will set a mind off. Too much coffee is my theory.

It seems the mind has had it with the Martha Stewart syndrome. She's the pluperfect
homemaker/designer/twit who recommended that homeowners leave precisely an inch of
snow on their lawn when shoveling. Or was it precisely a quarter of an inch? Obsessive
minds want to know. Call it the science of exterior decorating.

In these snowless climes, we have to make do with fallen foliage. I can hardly wait these fall
evenings to get home and arrange all the pin oak leaves on the lawn, in the car, in the house,
in everybody's hair, in perfect parallel lines. North to South. Simply use a compass and
rearrange daily.

The suggestion about an even level of the white stuff was maddeningly typical of Ms. Perfect
Homemaker. But even if her devotees wanted to follow that advice, where would they find
the snow in these latitudes? Who could afford to import a quarter-inch of snow from Chicago
to manicure every little inch of the law?

If I had that kind of money, I'd rather put it in something really enjoyable, like barbecue for
all. Messy, juicy barbecue, running with sauce and accompanied with baked beans and slaw
-- all of it one big, delicious stain waiting to happen. Martha Stewart would be horrified. I
would be delighted. So would my mind.

A culture that pays the slightest attention to Martha Stewart is rotten to the perfectly
decorated core, but here I've gone and obsessed about her for whole paragraphs -- a chunk
of run-on prose big enough to choke a good-sized horse. Or at least my errant mind has. It
has, as they say, a mind of its own. I disclaim any responsibility for it on mixed-up days like
this, when it should be cold and blustery, and instead Little Rock feels like Nassau in the
Bahamas.

Nor is my mind finished with Martha Stewart. It has just begun to obsess. As someone with
an abundance of sense and no pretensions once summed up the matter: "Slapping Martha
Stewart around ... it's a good thing.''

Reading her words of wisdom and condescension leaves one with an irresistible impulse (isn't
that a defense in this court?) to find a four-wheel-drive vehicle, head up to her perfectly
trimmed lawn in Connecticut or wherever, with its precise quarter-inch of snow, and cut
some good-sized doughnuts in it. But not without first rolling her perfectly sculpted trees.

Here on this tropical December morn, I should be doing my best to sound as dignified as
David Broder, bless his heart, but my mind is stuck in S.J. Perelman mode.

The last time it obsessed like this was after seeing some French film that was supposed to
elevate my ordinarily bourgeois sensibilities. It may have been Jules et Jim, a True
Masterpiece of the Cinematic Art, so magnificently understated that you felt as if you were
watching it in your sleep, or maybe underwater.

Or maybe it was an Ingmar Bergman film that consisted entirely of interlocking couples sitting
around talking for hours, for days, maybe years ... in Swedish. One of them
always has a beard.

Walking out of that little art movie theater in Columbia, Mo., back in college, or maybe it was
the old Thalia on the Upper West Side when December was still what December should be,
sighing a deep Gallic sigh and slipping on overcoats with everybody else who was supposed
to be Deeply Moved and Forever Changed, I was beset by a, yes, irresistible impulse: I
realized I had to get to the nearest bowling alley as soon as possible and start filling up on
pepperoni pizza. Preferably washed down with some nationally distributed, totally
pasteurized beer without a trace of charming local character. A Bud, maybe, or was it Schlitz
back then?

Anyway, I never wanted to hear about Jules et Jim again. Both of 'em could go
drown for all I cared, which is pretty much what happens in the film -- in a typical example of
French lakeside driving. If only they had taken Martha Stewart with them.

Where is my mind? I could've sworn I had it a moment ago. Here it should be hard at work
deciphering the latest presidential debate between Al Gore and Bill Bradley. Talk about a
Jules et Jim moment; either one could have played a title role in that delicate
ballet, especially the ponderous Bradley. Or maybe he's out of an Ingmar Bergman talkie.

As for the vice president, aka Poor Al, he's been positively caffeinated of late. He'd have to
be toned down to fit the languorous pace of a Truffaut film, the kind that goes on for a
millennium or two without anything of consequence actually happening. Or is that the Clinton
administration?

Meanwhile, wandering delirious somewhere out there in the December heat, like an
out-of-body Woody Allen, my mind keeps sending back uninhibited questions, as if it had
been reading too many newspaper headlines.

How would Martha Stewart handle this --- ignore these communiques from my wayward id?
Cover them up with a quarter-inch of sublimation? And why does my careening mind,
whenever it gets out of its cage, sound eerily like some correspondent from the avant-garde?
Is it because the news has merged with the theater of the
absurd?